Exclusive: Bioware's Doctors Talk Mass Effect 3

Bioware's main men Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Dr. Ray Muzyka talk about Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, future unannounced games, and much more in an exclusive interview with Game Informer.

The good doctors co-founded Bioware back in 1995 and are still running the network of studios as part of Electronic Arts, which purchased the developer in 2007. Both hold a menagerie of impressive titles. Greg Zeschuk (pictured left) is the president of Bioware, general manager of Bioware Austin (developer of The Old Republic), and is a VP at EA. Ray Muzyka is the CEO of Bioware, the group general manager of Bioware Group, and a senior VP at EA.

Ray Muzyka: Well, it’s exciting. That would be the word that comes to mind for me. It’s exciting to be able to deliver an epic trilogy and wrap up the story in a way that’s going to be really satisfying, and high impact, and intense. And answer a lot of questions for the fans and bring it to a really satisfying conclusion.

Greg Zeschuk: Another thing that’s cool is that we’ve been able to do it all on the same platform, as well.

Muzyka: We’ve added a platform to the trilogy, too, with PS3.

Mass Effect 2

Speaking of the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2, a lot of fans are wondering why the first game was not ported as well.

Muzyka: Well, it’s a range of factors. We made the determination that the game we thought represented the franchise the best was Mass Effect 2. And we brought it over and are really happy with the result. And as a result of investing a lot of effort into ensuring that it ran well and looked great and played great on PS3, now we can bring the trilogy to a close on PS3, and 360, and PC.

We knew the fans would want an introduction to the Mass Effect story arc so we added a special introductory sequence for the PS3 fans that kind of brought them into the mix and allowed them to make some epic choices that made the story their own and made it that much more personal.

One of the things that we’re really aware of for Mass Effect 3 as well is that we have a lot of new fans that are entering the fiction every time we launch one of these games. So we want to make sure it’s accessible and can appeal to someone who hasn’t played the first two games. Regardless of whether you played Mass Effect 1 or not or Mass Effect 2 or not, we want to make sure you have a great experience in Mass Effect 3. If you’ve played the first two games we want your choices to mean something. It’s really about building it for all of the different audiences we have to accommodate and delivering it at high quality.